


Finger On My Pulse

by EternalEclipse



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Rewrites S1-S3A, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Steter Secret Santa 2019, Stiles Stilinski Gets Things Done, Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes Live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21884050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EternalEclipse/pseuds/EternalEclipse
Summary: “Yes or no,” he says, and Stiles isn’t thinking about the Bite, or anything Peter is saying about it making Stiles Scott’s equal. Is this an outcome he’d accept? A soulmate he’d accept?Or, the one where Stiles has spent the last seven years with a soulmark like a missed connections page on Craigslist and now he's got other priorities. Like, y'know, freaky werewolves with a deathwish.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 57
Kudos: 771
Collections: Steter Secret Santa 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Harratus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harratus/gifts).



> For Harratus for Steter Secret Santa, thanks everyone for helping me find them! This is fully written, and I'm going to post the rest of it in the next couple days. Hope you enjoy it!

All the books said that meeting your soulmate was a magical moment you’d never forget, and all that sappy stuff. Conventional wisdom was a little less syrupy, acknowledging that most times when you met your soulmate it was a stranger, even if it went on to gush about how you would have an opportunity to have this _amazing_ relationship. Because soulmates, apparently, could only have good relationships. But the one thing everyone agreed on, at least, that when you met your soulmate, you would _know_.

Stiles found his soulmark one morning in the shower when he was nine.

At least he guessed it was a soulmark, because there was no other explanation. He’d stared at it a good long while, after scrubbing his skin until it was red and puffy to make sure it wasn’t a prank. It looked like he’d burned three spirals into the inside of his left arm, although it didn’t hurt or feel raised like there was an actual scar there. 

Stiles tried to figure out what to do. He should tell someone about it, he guessed, but who? His dad was never home, living at the police station as had become his wont, and spending what time he had off with his mom in the hospital. And his mom was really sick, and the doctors in the hospital had kept telling him not to stress her out because that could make her even sicker. He’d agreed, because he was afraid that if she faded anymore she’d fade away.

In the end, Stiles told Scott about it, but he didn’t think it was a soulmark because Stiles didn’t know when it showed up, and after they argued about it once they just never talked about it again. And that was how the status quo went for years to come.

By the time Stiles was in high school, he’d accepted that he would never know his soulmate, but that he had a best friend and that that was nearly as good.

That was, until it wasn’t.

* * *

Stiles’s life is werewolves now. That’s just how it is. His best friend is a werewolf. There’s a strange werewolf in the forest who bit him and nearly bit Stiles, and who’s apparently killing people. The long-dead Hales, apparently, were all werewolves. The last sane one standing is undressing in Stiles’s bedroom, about to play eye candy for one of Stiles’s acquaintances, and he’s a werewolf. And he’s got a tattoo just like Stiles’s soulmark right between his shoulder blades.

And because Stiles is who he is, he opens his big mouth to ask. “So, what’s that on your back?”

Derek scowled at Stiles over his shoulder. “That’s the Hale symbol. A triskelion.”

“Cool, cool, cool,” Stiles stutters. “And what is it? A soulmark?”

Somehow, Derek’s murder face gets darker. “It’s a tattoo,” he said. “And don’t talk to me about soulmarks.”

“Gotcha,” Stiles says, and starts running his mouth as usual. Derek ignores him, also as usual. But internally, he turns over “that’s the Hale symbol”, and wonders. If his soulmate was a Hale, did that mean they were dead? He’s considered it. It’s not like his was colorful or anything, he might not have noticed it fading. It’s been a long time, after all. But it does hurt a little where he hadn’t expected it to.

It also makes him feel about fifty times worse about the whole Derek-arm-candy situation. If his soulmate was from Derek’s family, then that sort of made him family too, and Stiles hadn’t been treating him as well as family ought. He’s at least going to fix that, he figures.

He wonders if Derek lost his soulmate in the fire, but decides not to ask.

* * *

It takes Stiles an embarrassingly long time to figure it out. To be fair, he just got kidnapped from the Winter Formal, his date and longtime crush was bloodied and not moving, and maybe Bitten (because there wasn’t enough werewolfery bullshit in his life right now) and maybe dead, and he’s got a list of a thousand things he’s worrying about anyway, because that’s who he _is_.

By the time he got past the manhandling and the threats and started trying to figure out what exactly Peter Hale’s bigger picture looked like, he was more concerned about how to keep his friends safe from that bigger picture. He thought that that was sensible enough, for all that spending a minute more than he could avoid around an unstable serial killer who he held no advantages against seemed like a bad practice.

He’d spent an entire car ride with the guy, and a long conversation in the parking garage while they searched for Derek, and it only really hit him when Peter offered him the Bite.

Peter snarked at him and then he was holding his left wrist aloft, and while his soulmark was lower down that arm, Stiles could have sworn he felt it burning from the nearness. A burned-looking triskele, the Hale symbol, for a man who had spent the last six years a burned wreck of a werewolf. 

“Yes or no,” he says, and Stiles isn’t thinking about the Bite, or anything Peter is saying about it making Stiles Scott’s equal. Is this an outcome he’d accept? A soulmate he’d accept?

He pulls back his arm, just in time. No, he decides. It’s not.

He’ll keep Derek though. If they’re not too late to save him, scowly bastard that he is, because that’s how family works.

Stiles doesn’t pull his throw when he helps set Peter back on fire, and tells himself that it’s just as well, and that he’s just keeping a murderer from hurting his friends. He’s decided. Whether or not Peter Hale is actually his soulmate, Stiles and his own is better off if he’s dead. He watches as the man falls.

That night, he tries to shower the guilt off of himself, scrubbing until he’s bright red and the stench of burnt flesh is scoured from his lungs. He’s also scrubbed off his soulmark, from the looks of it, and the confirmation makes him tremble slightly. He’s a murderer now. Maybe Peter Hale was the soulmate he deserved, if he could do that.

But Scott is safe now, and that’s not a consolation prize in his books.

Before he goes to sleep, he wonders if Peter knew.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to leave you all hanging, but it's been an extremely busy couple of days with lots of family and holiday stuff, and I haven't had time to sleep let alone navigate AO3 until now. I'm glad the first chapter hit so well, and I hope you enjoy the rest! :D

The second time Stiles noticed his soulmark, he was too tired to care. That’s what happens when you’re kidnapped, beaten up, forced to watch kids get tortured without being able to help, and dumped aside just in time to drive your car through a wall. The Jeep would never be the same, and neither would Stiles.

Stiles noticed Peter later, in the bleary moments between his grand entrance and Gerard’s disappearance, and with everything else that was going on Stiles’s brain just kind of shrugged and moved on. Peter hadn’t said anything to him, and frankly Stiles hadn’t wanted to think of the implications of his presence until after he’d gotten some sleep. Or ever, for that matter.

Peter gives Stiles that time. Stiles caught enough glimpses of the man out of the corner of his eye over the next few weeks to be certain that he was keeping tabs on him, but Peter didn’t openly approach him.

Then again, neither did Derek, or Isaac, or Jackson, or even Scott. Whatever was going on, Stiles was being deliberately kept out of it. He didn’t know if it was because of what happened with the Argents, or if it was about his soulmark, or even if it had been decided that having a human sidekick was useless. School quickly devolved into final exams and standardized testing, leaving Stiles busy with the least supernatural things he could think of.

It wasn’t enough.

But there wasn’t much he could do about it when someone who could _smell_ him at a hundred paces wanted to keep away from him. If the werewolves didn’t want to talk to him, then he wasn’t going to be able to catch them so easily. Not even staking out Scott’s house had come to anything once Melissa had caught him.

The loft is abandoned every time he stops by, and anything he left behind tends to turn up at his own front door. Naturally, he starts doing his homework there. No one bothers him, but he does occasionally hear a few growls.

After that got boring, he decides it’s time to switch tactics. If the pack wanted to avoid him that much, he has better things to do. Erica and Boyd never turned up after they left the Argent house. At the very least looking for them ought to be more productive.

The school year finishes, and the little he’d seen of the wolves turned into nothing, like the rest had vanished into thin air as easily as Erica and Boyd. The only reason he knows they haven’t gotten themselves killed yet doing something foolish was that Peter’s soulmark is still present and accounted for. Even if he truly wouldn’t put it past Peter to survive the rest of the loosely-affiliated pack and hang around laughing at him.

He does get into the police files though. Boyd and Erica’s families both reported them missing the same night as he’d been taken. He wonders why he’d never been asked about them, because three teens going missing the same night could have been related, but bringing it up would have meant bringing his dad into all this supernatural mess.

He does it anyway after the bodies start turning up. He has _lines,_ okay? The body of his old, uninvolved, innocent friend, who he’d just been with? That was one of them. Heather didn’t deserve that, and he didn’t particularly want to die on that hill, especially when it could so easily be him next.

The Sheriff had him drug tested. Fair enough, but not useful.

The tests came back negative the same day as the third body turned up, with the same ritualistic threefold cause of death.

That night, the Sheriff came home from work, more sober than he’d been in some time, and sat down across from Stiles at the kitchen table. He passed over the results, clear of anything except his ADHD meds, and said, “Let’s talk.”

Stiles stared at it for a moment, brain blanking on where to even start, before he booked it up the stairs. He came back down a few minutes later with a pile of his color-coded binders. “Okay.”

They talk. “Werewolves exist,” quickly followed by “I know, but Scott is one,” might not have been the best way he could have started that conversation, especially lacking any visual aids, but it helped to treat it like he was bringing in a peer rather than his father. Okay, he skimmed around some of the details. He’d mentioned the Hales, but skirted around saying that they’d killed Peter by saying that Derek had taken his Alpha powers. He’d also told about Jackson being turned into a murder lizard, “I really was just trying to do my best to keep everyone safe!”, but skimmed over his own brushes with death and Argents. It wasn’t like there was anyone qualified to give him therapy for all of it, so no need to worry his dad and muddy up the details.

The one binder he does leave with the Sheriff is the one he’d been putting together on the latest deaths, including the one who got found just that afternoon. To his credit, the Sheriff just took the binder. He also left copies of the few notes he’d come up with about Erica and Boyd’s disappearance, enough to turn the case into a potential kidnapping one on his testimony.

There was a hug. It wasn’t a particularly good one, maybe, but it was the first in a good long while. No words though, those would have to come later.

He misses school the next day, but that’s also fine. There’s nothing for him there anyway.

* * *

“Interesting choices you’re making here, Stiles. Dangerous ones, one might say.”

Stiles flinches back and goes into a full flail as he pushes his desk chair to face the bed. He hadn’t even heard Peter get in the window, much less the creaking the bed must have made under his weight. “Whoa, what the fuck are you doing here?” He squints suspiciously. “Have the pack finally figured out that they couldn’t manage without their resident genius?”

Peter makes a sound between a chuckle and a scoff. “They haven’t figured out much of anything yet. Typical of them—they want to go in with their claws, but they can’t even manage to get that far. But you? You told the Sheriff. That’s a bold move. Did you tell him how you killed me?” Stiles stiffens, and Peter bursts into a full bout of laughter. It wasn’t particularly nice. “I thought not. But I could always tell him, you know. It’d be easy, even.”

“It was a team effort,” Stiles protested. “Jackson actually hit you, and it was Derek who laid in the finishing blow.”

“So you’re willing to let Derek take the fall for you? Interesting.”

 _No._ No, he wouldn’t. Not unless the alternative was significantly worse, though Peter didn’t really need to know that.

“Why are you here, Peter? Because if it’s, you know, creepy, then I’d like to remind you that my Dad, _the Sheriff,_ who knows what you are, is in shouting distance.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Claws in, pup. We are on the same side, you know.”

Stiles’s face twists into a mix of consideration and disbelief, and he taps the side of the chair arm. “I can’t say I agree until I know what you want out of this. Someone like you always wants something, or you’d have cut and run to disappear somewhere.”

Peter puts a hand to his chest. “Ah, that hurt, Stiles. Can’t I just want the best for my nephew?”

Stiles tastes that statement. It might not even be a lie, but then why was he coming to Stiles now, when that wouldn’t get him anywhere in Derek’s good books for sure?

When he asks as much, Peter turns serious. Time for business then. Excellent. “The pack has been worrying over an alpha back that has come to Beacon Hills, either to challenge Derek’s authority for claiming the land, or to convince him to kill his pack and join them. Derek tried a rather risky idea to search Isaac’s memories for knowledge about them. They didn’t find much, but the memories included the other two delightful teenagers Derek bit. I don’t particularly care, but I hear you were looking for them. Interested?”

“Anything useful?”

“They’re in a large space, probably industrial, but Derek’s moved into the industrial zone and hasn’t found any scents to follow.” Peter shrugged.

“And you’re telling me this, why, exactly?” Stiles was suspicious, but…

“Think of it as a test.” Peter smiled at him, a disappearing, quicksilver thing, and promptly let himself back out through the window.

Ugh. The nerve.

He was going to need to lock that down. Someone, somewhere, had to sell werewolf-proof locks.

* * *

Stiles gets down to business. Even as things get crazy at school with animals killing themselves strangely all around them and what Stiles guesses were actually Alphas pretending to be transfer students, he keeps his face down and focused.

It was strange, maybe. Erica and Boyd weren’t really friends, barely acquaintances actually, and had been just fine hurting him the same as any other werewolf before they’d left. But there was something about it that made him feel like if he didn’t get them back safely, then Gerard Argent had won, somehow. Argent might have beaten him and gotten away with it, but living was a victory in this world. He was many things: stubborn was definitely one of them. The Alpha Pack didn’t have anything to do with Argent (that he knew of) but the best revenge was living well, and clearly Erica and Boyd weren’t. Besides, there was just something about the hidden power of being tortured together. Trauma bonding, or something else he should probably but wouldn’t be getting therapy for. The supernatural DLCs he didn’t have to pay for.

With the industrial park out of the picture, and likely the Preserve as well, Stiles went for the best place to hide scents—in the middle of people. Downtown Beacon Hills had the highest traffic, so he set his search parameters to places that had been condemned or disused in that area.

Werewolves had a bad habit of squatting, like human property laws were so much cotton to the wolf-brain. Why should an alpha pack be any different?

He narrowed it down to six places abandoned long enough and big enough to have an industrial feel and hide multiple people who likely were struggling but weren’t exactly tied down. It wasn’t all that hard once he got down to it, though there was no reason to believe that there were wolves in any of them. Then, of course, came the problem: who to tell.

Stiles could go it on his own, but he _was_ the squishy human teenager with nothing better than his metal baseball bat, the thankfully-repaired Jeep, and oversized flailing to his name. Even a backpack full of Molotov cocktails wouldn’t even his odds against a group of alphas.

He could involve the police, since his dad knew. They were busy with extra patrols with all the ritualistic deaths (and how those fit into an alpha pack situation he had no idea, maybe they were just insane? He knew not everyone involved had even seen them since he’d been with Heather, and there really wasn’t any other reason he could think of.) But what could a police officer do against a werewolf that could shrug off regular bullets nearly as easily as feathers? Even if he could convince his father to use wolfbane bullets, there was no way to convince the other mostly-green deputies to do so. Or the FBI. There was no convincing Rafe McCall of anything other than his own personal injustices.

He could involve the hunters, though he wasn’t at all inclined to trust the Argents, even after Chris let him go.

Or he could involve the pack. Get pushed into a few walls, with a fifty percent chance they’d actually do it. Derek was stubborn, and Isaac hated him enough to be contrarian. Scott was as like to be following Isaac these days, from what little he’d seen, and Stiles absolutely wasn’t ready to be relying on Peter to that extent. No sir.

But he had to do something. And if he didn’t make a better plan soon, it was going to be something stupid.

* * *

“Psst, Danny! Hey, Danny!” Stiles called out. It was the end of the school day, and people were rushing in the halls. Lacrosse practice was on, as always, so at least they were heading in the same direction. Danny obligingly slowed down for Stiles to catch up, something that never would have happened a year before.

“Is everything okay?” Danny asked.

“Yeah, yeah, no, everything’s fine!” Stiles babbled. “But, quick question. Say I wanted to send in an anonymous tip somewhere. What do I need to do to make sure it’s actually anonymous? Like no one could trace me if they were trying, anonymous?”

A few steps. “That doesn’t sound like nothing,” Danny replied evenly.

“I can pay you for it!”

“In money, or in Miguel?” Danny raised an eyebrow, and Stiles would have been more sheepish if he weren’t so focused.

“Like it wasn’t worth it last time?”

“Really, dude? Not the point.”

Stiles slumped. “In money, I swear. I don’t have much with the last repairs to my car, but I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important.”

“Okay. Let’s talk.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things get better, and others have to get worse first.

Rafe McCall wasn’t one of Stiles’s people. And with the Sheriff’s department so empty, the FBI had more resources to deal with things. And with everything going on, there were enough pointers towards domestic terrorism with a rising death toll for them to get more resources. Hypothetically. And given werewolves, Stiles was pretty sure that someone in the FBI was keeping a sign out for the supernatural, probably hunters who were used to being more careful than the Argents.

_Pretty sure._

There was a reason Stiles was sending the tip the way Danny had told him to and getting out of dodge, electronically speaking. He didn’t want anything to do with the fallout.

Afterwards, Stiles wanted to say that everything calmed down a bit. It might even have. There was a little bit of time when everything was mostly quiet, aside from a few more spontaneously suicidal animals than usual. He saw Peter a couple times out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t approach him again.

And then came the day that his dad didn’t come home on time. It wasn’t the first time, or even the first time lately, with how short-staffed they were, but it was notable enough that Stiles made sure to make a dinner box he could drop by the station for dual purposes of making sure his father ate and to find out what was causing his tardiness this time.

He walked in to a whirlwind of action. Tara was looking away when he walked in, but right as he was going to get her attention, he noticed something behind her. Someones. Boyd, and Erica, and another teenager his instinct said was a wolf. They were all crowded in on one bench, wincing at the bustle. Erica and Boyd looked up when he came in, meeting his eyes briefly, before—

“Stiles!” Tara called to him, finally noticing. “Your dad’s in his office, but don’t go in if it’s shut. We’re overrun with Feds with this last bust.”

“Is everything okay?” Stiles blinked with faked surprise.

“Better than usual, or at least there’s something to investigate that’s bringing people back alive, for once. But that’s more than I ought to say until things are released to the news.” Tara buzzed him in. Stiles gave her a smile and took one of the mints she kept on the desk. “Don’t get into trouble.”

“You know me, Deputy Graeme. I never do!” Stiles called over his shoulder before beelining for his father’s office. Unsurprisingly it was closed, and despite his curiosity, Stiles let it stay that way.

“Stiles?” Erica’s voice wobbled with something between stress and tears.

Safe enough. “Hi, Erica,” Stiles replied, settling on a nearby wall. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“It’s not like there’d be marks to show if I wasn’t,” she replied wryly, bolstering her energy. Stiles wondered if she’d always been like that and he hadn’t noticed.

“Why are you talking to him? He doesn’t smell like Pack,” the unknown girl commented.

“He’s fine,” Boyd tells her, and the girl subsides.

“Thanks for the roaring recommendation,” Stiles snarked. “And you are?”

“Cora Hale.”

Well, fuck. Another Hale showing up was one of the few things he hadn’t planned anything for. Apparently Kate Argent was as good at her job as she was at sanity—like a human trying to survive on saltwater and wondering why they’re dead three days later.

“Stiles!” the Sheriff called. Stiles sighed and grabbed the dinner box. So much for avoiding the fallout.

* * *

Peter turned up the night after that like stopped clockwork that finally reached the proper time of day. Stiles almost thought it was Derek, what with the wall-shoving, but Derek wouldn’t have known which part of his arm to grab to make it a real threat.

“Why involve the FBI?” Peter growled. “You might not be risking anything, _human_ , but the rest of us have to live with it if the government discovers the supernatural!”

“It’s not like I had a lot of options here!” Stiles protested. “And don’t tell me that the hunters don’t have a presence there, and probably some supernaturals too. How many omegas turn up as ‘domestic terrorists’ but don’t make the news? And what about other kinds of supernaturals?”

“Hunters never make anything better!” Peter snarled in his ear, reminding Stiles for the first time of the unhinged man who he’d helped off despite being his soulmate. It wasn’t a good reminder.

“Shove off! It’s done now, and you might not like my methods but I got it done faster than the pack could have, and everyone lived!”

“And they’ll kill us all before they go.” Peter growled.

“I think I liked it better when you were dead,” Stiles grumbled, before yanking out his taser and shooting it at Peter. At this range, Stiles could feel the energy of the bolts as they hit Peter and he staggered, just distracted enough for Stiles to slip away.

This trembling man on the ground? This was the one who terrorized his dreams? No. “No,” he repeated out loud. “Get out before I pull something stronger on you.”

Peter growled and flashed his eyes as the taser started to wear off. _He was going to need a stronger one of those._ But Peter just stood up and went for the window. “You do mean that, I hope. I still think that Fate’s chosen wrongly. I could never be bound to such a child who knocks over their blocks on a whim. Don’t come crying to me when the whole pack is dead and it’s your fault.”

Satisfied at getting the last word, Peter left.

* * *

And then, as if the universe was there just to fuck with him in particular, the Sheriff went missing. He just clocked out of one of his shifts and didn’t come home. None of the liquor shops had sold him anything, and he hadn’t gone to any of the local diners, Stiles checked those first.

Stiles finds out belatedly that Melissa is also missing, and wonders for a crazed half-second if Rafe McCall’s presence finally made his and Scott’s old childhood dream of being real brothers with three parents apiece a reality. Even if that reality involved Claudia Stilinski and not Rafe McCall. And then actual reality comes in like an earthquake hitting the hospital. _Fucking werewolves._

Stiles checks every traffic cam he can get a backway into, and, _there,_ it’s like the Sheriff disappears between one camera and the next. His first lead.

_Fucking werewolves,_ he curses again, before calling Boyd. He could tell Derek if he wanted, and Stiles risked less being shoved into a wall if it wasn’t him calling, most likely.

He goes out to meet them at the light he directed them to. Stiles doesn’t make it. Something collides into the Jeep, making it go off road and crash into something. Stiles spares a thought to how it was just repaired and how neither he nor his wallet could withstand the trauma of seeing another mechanic killed by Beacon Hills nonsense before darkness took him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! Thanks for sticking with me & I hope you enjoyed it!

Stiles wakes up to the taste of copper and dust. Not pleasant, but considering he didn’t remember getting pulled unconscious, about the best he could ask for. The maybe-concussion wasn’t helping though. Concussions never did, and he had had too many of them at the hands of poor Roscoe of late.

Speaking of concussions, his vision swam like salmon mating season and he threw up everything that was in his stomach. No blood though, mercy for small favors.

“I think he’s awake,” a woman’s voice came through the fog. Something was clicking irritatingly in the room. Stiles was inclined to blame the concussion until he got a look at the newcomer’s bare feet.

Huh. He hadn’t known werewolves could do that. He wondered how many pairs of shoes the wolfess had ruined that way.

“The Hales haven’t noticed yet. We should knock him back out,” Someone else suggests. Probably another wolf, although Stiles would bet good money that he wasn’t the alpha.

“Humans don’t generally withstand that well, Ennis.” Another voice chimes in. Male, British, and talks like he’s in control. Probably the leader, if that voice could suggest anything. And _was_ it suggesting. It was the difference between letting butter defrost on the counter and chucking it in the microwave on high. The other wolves might be powerful, but against this one Stiles was unequivocally _fucked._

“Who are you?” Stiles grits out.

“An enemy, of course.”

“Fun. Taken any Acting 101 classes lately? Because that could not be any more _cheesy_.”

Someone picks him up and tosses him back on the ground, and Stiles groans. His bruises have bruises, and there’s no use hiding his pain among wolves. The best he can hope for is information, and for that he needs to be focused on the things he can change, not the things he can’t. “What a classic. Bravo for creativity, someone get that person an Emmy.” –And yet, sarcasm.

Stiles was mostly expecting the world to go ‘hello darkness my old friend’ by that point. For better or worse it did shortly thereafter, when Tree #3 smashed him back into the ground. He heard the clicking of claws and the Alpha’s gentle admonishment as he fell back into blessed unconsciousness. Oops.

* * *

Stiles woke up to mild dehydration. Either he’d gotten another concussion or he had just been sleeping for that long. No way to tell either way, of course. He was no werewolf, he had to heal up the old fashioned way.

The pack hadn’t been keeping too close an eye on him, probably having deemed him harmless, although they had to know he was awake by now. Best time to strike, while they underestimated him? Or worst, because they were aware of him? Stiles figured he’d start with some recon either way and go on from there.

First observation: he was alone. _Elementary, my dear Watson._

That meant that it was possible, even likely, that these weren’t the people who’d taken his father. While they’d proven the willingness and ability to hold multiple prisoners stronger than him, these wolves had never needed to keep Erica, Boyd, and Cora Hale separate from what he’d heard. With at least his dad and Melissa missing, that meant there was another player he’d have to deal with once he got out of here.

Another player made sense with everything going on in town, but that also meant that he might be getting free to become an orphan properly this time. _Are you okay, Annie?_ He was trying not to think about it.

Against his instincts, Stiles tried to get the wolves’ attention. He rattled his chains, shouted, sang loudly and off-key, and pretended he was dying. No dice. No one even coming around to check on him.

His next step was to get out of the chains. Easier said than done, but from the looks of things he had time on his side this time. It helped that they weren’t that well-secured. Probably meant for werewolves who’d sooner try to brawn their way out than brain the locks. It took some dedicated time, and he had to hide it when claw girl came by and threw a roll and a water bottle at him, but it was worth it. He could leave any time he pleased as long as he has a way out.

The last step would be to figure out when to break out.

That takes some time. Stiles ends up sleeping fitfully, feeling even more tired after than when he’d started. It sounded like the pack was gathering for some reason, and that didn’t bode well for his chances of escape. He kept at it though, wanting to be rested when his chance came. He kept track of time in rolls and bottles of water, unreliable as that was.

A few hours after his latest meal, while he was still nursing the water, the air changed. Someone entered the building who wasn’t their pack but who was powerful. Stiles wasn’t sure how, but he could feel them from where he was.

“You know what I’m here for,” the newcomer says. She's familiar, somehow.

Familiar or not, she is his ticket out. Stiles climbs out of the chains and crept over to the sounds of fighting. It's hard to see exactly what was going on. Claws and howls abound, and he isn't sure how he's getting past, until…they all shrink. The wolves were becoming human. Why were the wolves human? And the newcomer, he’s never seen something that looks like that before.

Still, as he can personally attest to, human didn’t mean useless. His escape was definitely being noticed. Two of the apparently-not-wolves-right-now come at him, and Stiles has to do _something_. Freezing means death. Flight might be possible…if he’d had more to eat in the last two days than a couple rolls and some water. No dice, he's as likely to collapse as get out the door. That leaves fight, and on more even odds than he’d been expecting. He picks up something heavy and hits them in the neck. Both wolves go down, and suddenly everyone is looking at him.

In the moment between the wolves falling and their leader reacting, claw girl tries him. She meets the same fate. So Stiles keeps going.

He drops the leader, and there is a slow clap. Stiles flinches around in both surprise and pain, only to see the pack he was hoping to two days ago. Derek looks like Stiles had personally killed his goldfish on purpose and made him watch him flush it down a toilet, but Erica and Boyd mostly look relived. Peter is the one clapping, and Stiles decides he can fix that later. Or never. Never worked too.

“That’s Julia,” Derek nearly whispers.

“That’s dead,” Peter tells Derek, before turning to Stiles. “Thanks for taking care of our other problem in town. The Alpha pack was getting tedious, as was this darach. The research is interesting, but not _that_ interesting.”

“My dad?” Stiles was too exhausted to care about anything else.

“Safe.”

“Better be.”

And then he passed out, again. Someone caught him, but he was too gone to see who.

* * *

Stiles wakes up on his own bed. There’s the mark of his dad being there in the police things cluttering Stiles’s desk, though the man himself was missing, and Peter is sleeping against the window sill. He wakes up as Stiles shifts.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Peter?” Stiles asks.

“Seeing the sights,” was the glib response. Stiles just raised an eyebrow, and Peter went on. “Acknowledging that you can hold your own for our pack, even if you did call the FBI in on that one.”

Stiles snorts. “Well that’s something, I guess. Gonna disappear again? Maybe off a cliff this time? Sink your body into the ocean and you might not be able to get back if you can skip death again.”

“Bloodthirsty, I like it.”

“Creep.” But Stiles makes a point of turning away from Peter in favor of pulling his bedspread up higher, like an extra layer of cloth between Peter and his soulmark would be an extra layer of reality.

“You say that like I care about human foibles. Or like humans care when it’s soulmates.”

Stiles turns back. How could he do otherwise? “So we’re talking about that now?”

“Derek’s going to come by, all guilty for ignoring you. If you accept that, you’ll become part of his pack, and we’ll have at least one thing in common. Besides, even if you brought in the FBI, yesterday reminded me of why I would have bitten you. You’re an excellent wolf, just missing a few claws.”

“And that’s enough?”

Peter leans forward, grabbing Stiles’s arm. He presses into the raised skin through Stiles’s flannel. “It’s a start. It helps that the FBI is leaving, of course.”

That was as close as Peter would ever get to admitting that he’d been wrong. Stiles’s breathing quickens, his heart beating double time. He isn't sure if it is fear or attraction, and the ambiguity isn't helping his problem. “A start, then. How about starting with what I’d be walking into, with Derek?”

“Ah, yes, the story of our pack.” Peter lets go of Stiles’s arm in favor of taking mincing, dramatic steps over a laundry heap towards the desk chair. _Too far_ , something in him cried out. Certainly not the vestiges of his self-preservation. Peter rested his feet on the bed, the pressure on the blankets snugging his own in place, and something in him eased. Was this what it was to acknowledge a soulmate?

Is Peter a soulmate he could accept?

Eventually, the Sheriff’s car pulls in and Peter stops. That is a discussion they aren't quite ready for, they both figure.

But Stiles rubs a wrist across Peter’s neck, scent-marking him. Something in Peter lightens, and Stiles finds himself being scent-marked in return. _Well, as long as he doesn't go insane again, maybe_ , he decided. He was going to need someone like Peter in this brave new world, and it looked like Peter was going to need someone like him.


End file.
